After Hours (1985)
Dark comedy, directed by Martin Scorsese. Griffin Dunne plays Paul Hackett, a frustrated office drone in New York City. Paul meets an eccentric blonde named Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) in a diner. After being invited to her apartment in SoHo, late at night, a sequence of absurd accidents and unfortunate coincidences sends him on a paranoid odyssey through a nightmarish New York in the wee hours of the night, trying to get back home.
Let me go on a little tangent here: There is an indie game on itch.io, also on Steam, I'm pretty sure, called Blank Frame. Blank Frame is a short-ish horror game from Finland about a man named Henri who, for a variety of reasons, finds himself incapable of leaving his apartment and spending his night going through a variety of surreal misadventures attempting to do so. Apart from being a very obvious homage to Silent Hill 4, it feels oddly like an inversion of this movie about a mans futile struggles to get back to his apartment, all the way up to the tone being simultaneously anxiety inducing and absolutely hilarious, in a kafkaesque way.
Pauls journey through nocturnal SoHo has a dreamlike quality to it, where whatever loose logic the events happening to him follow, seems to have the sole purpose of denying him any catharsis. He tries his best to score with various women, yet all if them turn out to be some variety of insane. He tries to get the money for his fare back home, yet something always goes wrong. He gets the blame for various crimes committed in the neighborhood and with every attempt to prove his innocence, he digs himself deeper. Whatever he does, the man simply can't catch a break as he's being pinballed between seedy bars, apartments buildings and clubs and the odd, yet also oddly well characterized, people who occupy them.
There is, certainly, some subtext to a story about a white collar yuppie struggling to survive a night in a neighbourhood of sexual minorities, artists and various types of subculturalists that takes him way out of his comfort zone. There is a point to be made that, while Paul suffers some tremendously bad luck, not all of through no fault of his own. So many times when things go wrong for him, he tries to take the easy way out rather than taking full responsibility. Even though he, certainly, has a very big pile of shit dumped on to him in the very beginning, he surely doesn't miss any opportunity to dig himself in, rather than out. Which might be what stops this movie from approaching actual horror.
Because, make no mistake, there is something decidedly uncomfortable to After Hours. We glimpse that there is a darkness to many of the eccentric characters Paul comes across and while most of the dark events he comes across or is told about are played for humor, they are dark indeed. After Hours is the story of a man who has the rug pulled out under him, who is deprived of the quotidian logic of his bourgeois life and his 9 to 5 job to be left stranded in a place that might as well be a foreign country for how much he knows about navigating it. It's a story about a man way out of his depth, stuck in a place that seems actively hostile to him and deprived if a way out, at least on his own terms. Making it quite clear that his place is somewhere else, as the absolutely pitch perfect ending emphasizes.
After Hours is a fantastic movies, straight up. Probably one of the most overlooked in Scorsese's filmography. It's a meticulously constructed, darkly comedic and cheekily surreal journey through a kafkaesque nightmare of city life. About naking one wrong turn and ending up in a different world. As bizarre and exaggerated After Hour's SoHo is, it's a a perfect playground for all the meticulously constructed setups and payoffs to play out as they come to punish Paul one by one for being a stuck up yuppie in a place where his sort is not welcome and not adapted to. It is funny, tremendously so, but it's also beautifully uncomfortable. After Hours is, frankly, a damn fantastic movie.
